1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus that transmits and receives maintenance work data to and from an information processing apparatus, a method of controlling the same, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
For current image forming apparatuses, there has been proposed a remote maintenance service using voice and moving image communication, and remote control (see e.g. Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-208974). In the remote maintenance service, when an image forming apparatus suffers from an error, it is possible to solve the problem by directly telling a user how to eliminate the error from a call center without sending a service person to the user's site for repair. This makes it possible to reduce time required to eliminate the error.
In this remote maintenance service, it is effective for a user to achieve connection with the call center by using a communication unit of the image forming apparatus without using an apparatus other than the image forming apparatus, such as a telephone and a PC.
In view of this, there has been proposed a technique for providing an image forming apparatus with a communication unit that is compatible with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), and transmitting and receiving moving image data and voice data to and from another information terminal connected to the Internet by a session established using SIP (see e.g. Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-221709).
To establish a SIP session through a firewall introduced to an office, there is a high possibility that infrastructure improvement, such as provision of SIP proxy, is required. Some offices may have difficulty in introducing SIP because of the capital investment required for this.
To solve this problem, there has been proposed a technique for establishing a session between information terminals using HTTP having high compatibility with a firewall (see e.g. Allround Internet Telephony Protocol: HTTP-based Conference Application Protocol (Special Issue on High Speed Networks and Multimedia Applications) IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan) Journal 44(3), 553-560, 2003-03-15).
Access from the Internet side to an information terminal protected by a firewall is limited. On the other hand, access from the information terminal side inside the firewall to the Internet is allowed when HTTP having high compatibility with the firewall is used.
Therefore, in the above-mentioned IPSJ Journal 44(3), 553-560, two information terminals separated from each other by the firewall achieve session establishment therebetween by accessing a session management server, to which each information terminal can connect as an HTTP client, from the information terminal side, respectively.
In the remote maintenance service, the image forming apparatus is sometimes required to be restarted according to an instruction or an operation from the call center side depending on the details of maintenance and the details of a trouble. For example, the image forming apparatus is required to be restarted e.g. in a case where the setting change has bee made which becomes effective only after the restart.
In a case where the remote maintenance service is carried out using the conventional technique, when the image forming apparatus is subjected to restarting, a session between the image forming apparatus and the session management server is temporarily disconnected, but there is a case where the remote maintenance is desired to be continued also after the restart so as to confirm the changed settings and continue the maintenance work.
In the conventional technique, to establish a session again after a session between the two information terminals and the session management server is temporarily disconnected, it is necessary to reconnect from the information terminal side to the session management server.
Therefore, to continue the remote maintenance work, the user of the image forming apparatus is required to perform the operation for connecting from the image forming apparatus to the session management server again.
If the user is away from the image forming apparatus, the user is called by another apparatus, such as an ordinary telephone, and is requested to move to the image forming apparatus to perform a reconnection operation, which consumes the user's time.
Further, if the situation is inconvenient to the user, and hence the user is not available, the reconnection operation is not executed, and hence a session cannot be established, which makes it impossible to perform the remote maintenance.